PIA08901: The Familiar Division

The Cassini Division appears to emerge out of Saturn’s shadow in this
Cassini spacecraft image. This division between the A and B rings, visible
through modest telescopes from Earth, actually contains five dim bands of
ring material, here seen near the left side of the image between two small
dark gaps.

This detailed view also displays a great deal of structure in the B ring,
left of the division. The Cassini Division is 4,800 kilometers (2,980
miles) wide.

This view looks toward the unlit side of the rings from about 59 degrees
above the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Feb. 9, 2007 at a distance of approximately 1.7
million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 10
kilometers (6 miles) per pixel.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European
Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages
the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The
Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and
assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space
Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.